Abstract

Carrying out empirical studies to understand the problems of software engineering is widely held to be of importance. A view less widely held within the software engineering community is that experiments should be replicated externally (i.e. by different researchers) to both verify and validate the original results and so build up a sound body of knowledge (as opposed to drawing conclusions from a single study). This paper presents the results of an external replication of an experiment which tested the benefits to maintenance of using modular code against non-modular (monolithic) code. The results of the original experiment [8, 9] showed that a modular program could be maintained significantly faster than an equivalent monolithic version of the same program under the condition that modularity has been used to implement information hiding which localizes changes required by a modification. The results of our replication, however, were strikingly different from those of the original and...

Citations